Event Details

On view in Perth 10 October 2015 – 31 January 2016

A highlight for the Art Gallery of Western Australia is the much-anticipated Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices.

This is the first exhibition in Australia to present the complex artistic and cultural interactions between the East and the West from the 1500s to the 1800s – a period known as the ‘Age of Spices.’

Demand for spices spurred on the great voyages of exploration and the establishment of vast empires across Asia. Treasure Ships presents the stories of the spice markets, slave trade and shipwrecks, as well as illustrating the astonishing beauty of Chinese porcelain, known as ‘white gold’ and celebrating vibrant Indian textiles created for export around the world.

This exhibition includes 250 outstanding and rarely-seen examples of ceramics, decorative arts, furniture, maps, metalware, paintings, prints and textiles from public and private collections in Australia, India, Portugal, Singapore and the United States. A highlight of the exhibition is the shipwreck artefacts retrieved from the Batavia and the Gilt Dragon, which sank off the Western Australian coast in the seventeenth century.